2.03.2014

Black Girls' Night Out: Mary Jane Paul

The theme of this episode is all about addiction and the various forms that it can take. Mary Jane longs for the woman that she used to be, but finds that it's harder to give up her addiction than she thought.

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you.You just have to find the ones worth
suffering for.”

~Bob Marley

The episode starts out with Mary Jane performing oral sex on
Andre in her living room.Yes, they
decided to jump right into it this week.And wait, wasn’t he just making love to his wife in the last episode?Oops. Her brother pops up in the back
yard and spoils the party, making no move to shield his eyes or alleviate her
embarrassment that he's caught her in such a compromising position.(And this
is why you should get some damn curtains for all those curtainless windows,
Mary Jane.)

Patrick calls his sister out for sleeping with a married man and
then proceeds to shock the hell out of her by addressing Andre by
name. It turns out that he used to
promote her brother’s club, and it’s hard to tell whether she’s more upset that
her brother knows her secret or that he and Andre are already acquainted.

She goes off on Andre when he tries to assure her that
things aren’t as bad they seem, but she’s suddenly fixated on a non-functioning
pool light that he’d promised to fix and never had. Fully clothed, he
jumps into the pool, fixes the light, and Mary Jane is like silly putty
in his hands.Omari Hardwick in a wet
t-shirt or no, I don’t get why she considers this such a romantic gesture, but
okay.Well, not okay, but for the purposes of this recap, I’ll pretend it
is.Moving on.

We get more gratuitous oral sex, except this time Andre is
reciprocating.Good for him.At least that’s one thing he’s not selfish
about.After a nap, she gives him back
his ring and tells him that she
doesn’t want it “like this.” (Yes, because most women want to be proposed to by a married man.) I
want to cheer, but since I’m not that naïve, I manage to control the impulse.

We next see Mary Jane at her parent’s house where she and the women
in the family are planning a surprise party for her brother.Patrick enters the kitchen and immediately
starts throwing undercover shade at her.With
obvious delight at how uncomfortable she is, he holds up a crossword puzzle and slyly asks for an eight-letter word for an extra-marital affair.Mary Jane looks mortified, Patrick looks
tickled, and I find myself liking him more and more.

She pulls him aside and begs him not to tell anyone, even going so far as to
offer to pay him to keep the scandalous information to himself.As any good brother would, he calls her on
her actions then informs her bluntly that her behavior reminds him of an
addict.And given that he is one, he should know.In the end, Patrick does agree to keep her
secret, but declines to share the reason he’d stopped by her house in the
first place.

At the station, Kara pitches a story to MJ about a woman
who’d been found dead in her apartment and hadn’t been missed for three
years.MJ says she’ll think about it,
and after watching the documentary of the woman’s story, she later agrees.This doesn’t go down well with Cynthia—the
face of SNC—who stops by Mary Jane’s office to basically tell her to
stay in her lane. Ouch.

Mary Jane goes home, soaks in a bubble bath and then tries
to exorcize her addiction by deleting Andre’s contact information out of her
phone.That lasts about as long as it takes me to type this sentence because the next time we see her, she’s yelling at some poor, likely
underpaid customer service representative because she desperately
wants to get the deleted information back.Realizing that she’s acting like an addict desperate for her next fix,
she calls her brother for a little intervention. (Personally, I think she's addicted to the idea of Andre more than she is to the man himself, but whether she'll ever figure that out remains to be seen.)

Although she’s glad to see him when picks her up for a
little brother/sister bonding time, she’s not so happy when they pull up in front
of Aunt Toni’s house.And given the way
that her super creepy uncle palms her ass like a basketball in a hug that goes on way too
long, can any of us really blame her?These
scenes at her aunt’s house highlight that Mary Jane has lost touch with a vital
part of herself.It’s clear that she’s lost
her way—both literally and figuratively—and she has no idea why or how to pull herself back from the brink.

After dinner, she and Patrick swing by his old
club, and as they sit outside in the empty parking lot, he tells her once again
that she should leave Andre alone.He
also tells her that she shouldn’t hesitate to call him if she needs him.I really like their relationship.We’ve been shown a more contentious
relationship in past episodes but here we learn that even if they're not
be as close as they used, they still love each other very much.

Sprinkled throughout the episode, we also get glimpses of
Patrick’s problems, and there are many.He doesn’t think he deserves a sobriety anniversary party because he
feels that being sober is something he’s supposed to do.He’s trying to start a new business, but gets
the brush-off from an old acquaintance when he tries to obtain investment
capital.And he’s humiliated when he
goes home late after his outing with Mary Jane only to have to knock on the
door like a troublesome teenager because he's not allowed to have a key.I fully understand why his father doesn’t
want him to have one, but I still feel for him all the same.

He goes back to the converted home office that is his
bedroom and promptly falls off the wagon.In hindsight, I now wonder if he didn’t want the sobriety anniversary
party because he knew that he’d started using again.

We also see Kara and Mark trying to make their newfound
working relationship work, but it starts on shaky ground.He blows off a planned meeting and later
makes it clear to her that he’s not feeling their new arrangement.He just wants to do the news, but Kara
reminds him that in order for him to do what he wants to do, they have to sprinkle in “sexy”
stories that will make everything else sell.After thinking about it for a moment (helped along the fact that
his show is not doing well in the ratings, I’m sure), he agrees, and they’re
all smiles.

The episode ends with Mary Jane lying in bed, hair down,
make-up done and we all know that can’t mean anything good.It doesn’t.She stares up at the ceiling, a contemplative expression marring her
face, before she rolls over and curls up next to Andre.

Oh, Mary Jane, what are we going to do with you? She knows what she's doing isn't right and isn't mentally healthy, but she keeps right on doing it anyway. I'm not inclined to believe that she's addicted to Andre more than I am the fact that she's using that as an excuse to continuously indulge in bad behavior. Here's hoping she shows his butt the door sooner rather than later.

That's what gets me. I like the characters (except Andre), the production, the acting, the concept. The married man storyline is not needed; they should have let it go after the pilot. I really hope that by the end of the first season they write Andre off the show and start again fresh next season.

I got to see some few minutes of BMJ, but I got sick to my stomach looking at those final minutes of stupidity.( Unfortunately, I won't be able to watch this series as much as I would like as I've done with the others because I'm in my home with other people who also hog ties the TV on Tuesday night),but Iucked up a little with this.)

Andre is leaving his beloved wife for Mary?. Now how many times have we heard that one? If he is serious about his supposed divorce , I still wouldn't want to be with him.Just like I would say with Orlitz on Scandal, Mary needs to drop this man. As Wendy Williams would say " How you get them is how you loose them." Mary Jane is crazy in thinking that Andre will give her the world because he isn't. That is how the story goes.

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